Landscape design

Urban design

TILDA SWINTON

Feeling fragile, fundamental architecture

photo by Gaia Cambiaggi, text by Federico NicolaoShe has won the Oscar for best actress in a supporting role for the film “Michael Clayton” directed by Tony Gilroy, but for us she is, above all, the creator, together with Isaac Julien, of “Derek”, a film which has been presented at the Serpentine Gallery as a tribute to Derek Jarman, the English independent film director who died of Aids in 1994, and whose dazzling vision of London still shines brightly. After just a few shots of Jarman’s house and a flash of her passing by the place where her friend is buried, we are transported back to the heart of a world which still sparkles with a very special light that will never go out: London in the 1980s-90s, and the reflections about that period by Peter Doig, Isaac Julien and Cerith Wyn Evans, who grew up with Jarman. Tilda has always been able to take the audience to a very atmospheric place: with heartrending force. “For me film and painting both start with a blank space to be filled – and with the same sense of freedom”: Tilda Swinton provided Jarman with the means to use this freedom and let people feel its underlying fragile bases. Like something coming from the most mysterious depths of our imagination, Tilda proved in England in the 1980s that she was one of the most mysterious and fascinating actresses around, due to that very unique bond which ties her to a very secret and singular way of exploring space through movement, voice and visual expression. A Cambridge graduate, born into a very old Scottish family in 1961, she is a rebellious actress who knows how to take full advantage of the liberating aspects of her work; she knows how to bring together and reveal both context and thought, and she really understands how to bring things to life. She is an icon of the art film industry. But this hardly grasps the full significance of the wild figure with a terrified look in her eyes who captured the audience’s attention in “The Last of England”, the sublime female-cloud embodying both hallucination and desire in the extraordinary final sequence showing the suburbs ablaze, and the dramatic industrial backdrops in Thatcher’s England seemed to be transformed forever by the vision of Jarman, taking on greater volume and depth and triggering off a need for revenge just by her presence alone. Tilda is Jarman’s accomplice and muse: they made lots of films together, from her first appearance in “Caravaggio” right through to the very end: they were intensive years of joint experimentation. In “Wittgenstein” she played “the woman standing before the philosopher”, as she described herself, dressed in deep red, bright yellow and striking turquoise. With a huge comb right in the middle of her hair, her eyes and mouth painted with tribal signs, she impersonated Ottoline Morrell. She also played Queen Isabel in “Edward II”, which won a prize at the Venice Film Festival. Her eyes have been sparkling ever since her first film shots with Derek’s Super 8 camera, and she is now making more commercial films (she made “Orlando” with Sally Potter and has also acted for Béla Tarr, Jim Jarmush, the Cohen brothers, Robert Lepage and Eric Zonca). But in “Blue”, Derek’s film testament famous for its form, she is pure voice on the blue screen, and she is able to change the film entirely, to bring the filmmaker’s story to life, taking us to the very edges of the image, giving depth to the colour concealing the face of the illness from which Jarman was dying. Experimentation with space is her sweetest obsession. In 1995 she was shut away in a glass showcase in a revolutionary installation by Cornelia Parker on display at the Serpentine Gallery and in Rome. Visitors, including the philosopher Ferrari who then wrote about her, rocked her gently with their eyes as she appeared to sleep, literally circling around her. The tailors Viktor&Rolf love to take fashion out of its context at their shows: they chose her as a muse for their most successful collection of all, the one in which they restructured the lines of conventional clothes to create for Tilda blouses whose forms were doubled, tripled, and multiplied endlessly like the projects in which she will continue to appear – as a magnificent obsessions.Federico Nicolao(Italy, 1970) writer and philosopher. He lives in France and Italy and has written numerous essays on the arts and literature. He is the founding-editor of the magazine “Chorus una costellazione”.

Pavel Büchler is an artist, lecturer and writer. He is committed to the catalytic...

16 March 2011

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